The accidental history of Niantic’s Pokémon Go, as told by John Hanke

John Hanke put in his time evangelizing location-based gaming and augmented reality. He spent six years refining Ingress as the first AR game from Niantic Labs, which was incubated by Google. So it’s nice to see that work pay off with the success of Pokémon Go, which has generated an estimated $200 million in sales since its launch on July 6, according to Sensor Tower.

Hanke now officially qualifies as a visionary, or someone who sees something that no one else does. He was willing to undergo derision and skepticism during the hard years of investing in Ingress. Now he has put AR on the map, and that notion of AR being a $90 billion business by 2020 (as predicted by Digi-Capital) doesn’t seem as crazy anymore.